The White Negro Problem

By David Kamp

Published: October 24, 2004

HIP
The History.
By John Leland.
Illustrated. 405 pp. Ecco/
HarperCollins Publishers. $26.95.

DON'T be misled by the glib title; ''Hip: The History'' is not a decade-late cash-in book on martini revivalism and what made Frank and Dino swing. Rather, it's a thoroughgoing, research-intensive analysis of that uniquely American anti-establishmentarian posture known as hip, undertaken by a fellow who's spent much of his career ruminating on the subject, John Leland, a reporter for The New York Times and a former editor in chief of Details. Leland has assigned himself a mighty task: to explain the history of hip from its 18th-century origins in America's West African-born slave population, where hip evolved as a sort of whitey-confounding slanguage (evidently, the word ''hip'' derives from the Wolof term ''hepi'' or ''hipi,'' meaning ''to see'' or ''to open one's eyes''), to today's epidemic of ubiqui-hip, of corporate-sponsored grooviness (iPods, Gap ads) and pan-cultural dreadlocks.

Hip, in Leland's view, is an outgrowth of the process whereby Europeans and Africans built a new country side by side, inventing identities as Americans ''in each other's orbit.'' That they did so as social unequals is what made things interesting -- blacks developed their own insular customs and code-speak, which were appropriated, if not totally understood, by curious whites, whose own customs were copied by aspirational blacks, whose artistic flowering during the Harlem Renaissance enthralled white bohemians, and so on and so forth, creating a ''feedback loop of hip'' (Leland's words) that has engendered all manner of mutant hipster poses, from Dizzy Gillespie's French-existentialist specs-and-beret get-up to Lou Reed's quasi-ironic proclamation ''I wanna be black.''

The organizing principle of ''Hip: The History'' is that America has experienced a series of what Leland calls ''hip convergences,'' periods in which current events and societal circumstances have conspired to spark a cultural paradigm shift, an explosion of new art forms and new criteria for what's cool and what ain't. The first convergence was the development in the 19th century of America's first homegrown cultural idioms, the blackface minstrel show and the blues -- the former, a bizarre kind of stage entertainment (the century's most popular) in which white performers enacted their fascination with blacks by imitating them in crude stereotype; the latter, the first music created by blacks as Americans, reflecting on their experience as an oppressed people. Later periods of hip convergence include the 1910's and 20's, when the radical bohemians of Greenwich Village and the renaissancers of Harlem fed off each other's energy, and the midcentury heyday of Beat and bebop, two outsider movements that set the stage for the huge (albeit unhip) counterculture juggernaut of the 1960's. (Norman Mailer's famous essay from the height of Beat-bebop convergence, ''The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,'' was essentially a sketch for ''Hip: The History,'' and is duly mentioned in the introduction.)

The latest hip convergence is in the here and now, a time when hip's ideology, Leland notes, ''has become the mainstream's.'' Rather than taking the predictable stance that hip is played out, and nothing and no one will ever be truly cool again, Leland argues that hip is simply moving on as it always has, sloughing off the old polarities that defined it in the past -- black versus white, straight versus gay, Iron Curtain versus NATO -- and redefining itself in a new world where whiteness is as much an adopted pose as blackness. Whereas Elvis was a white Negro, the doofus Ashton Kutcher wannabe, in his ironically worn sideways Von Dutch white-trash trucker hat, is, Leland says, a ''White White Boy . . . a whiteface minstrel.''

Intriguing, bracing stuff; ''Hip: The History'' abounds with such joyful little provocations and nuggets of concentrated thought. But the book isn't consistently this readable. One of the grave issues that face any writer undertaking a book-length exercise in sociology is, am I writing for a popular audience or for the academy? Leland, to his book's detriment, hasn't chosen a clear path. There are crackling bits, but there are also passages of dissertationish slog, especially in the early chapters, where his writing about the Transcendentalist poets and the early bluesmen is stiff and polite, as if he were following some professorial etiquette for ''proper'' history writing. Leland also has an enervating tendency to refer self-consciously to his book's superstructure, as if his readers were attending a lecture series: ''As I'll discuss in Chapter 15, booms in immigration bring new ideas''; and, ominously, ''I'll discuss this gynocracy more in Chapter 11.''

In another of these awkwardly declarative moments, Leland proclaims, ''This is a book about an abstraction,'' which points the way to a different problem: hip is a slippery, not easily defined thing. ''Hip: The History'' frequently pauses during its concrete analyses of hipster milieus to ponder what, precisely, hip is. While an introductory or concluding essay in this vein would have been welcome, Leland too often interrupts the flow of his own narrative with bouts of windy C'est quoi, hip? theorizing that sow confusion rather than shed light. Discussing, for example, the impact of the Internet's democratic culture upon hip, Leland ties himself up in syntactical knots: ''The Net, by contrast, is an operating system that does not need alphas. . . . Its consensuses are micro -- within subgroups rather than between them.''

To me, the best cultural critics are those who write with a bit of hipster zip themselves, people like Nick Tosches, Clive James and Harvard's too-fun-for-academe maestro of African-American studies, Henry Louis Gates Jr. The most insightful parts of ''Hip: The History'' come when Professor Leland tosses off his mortarboard, loosens up and joins this exalted company. His smarts and wit shine through his set pieces on the pulp-noir vogue of the 1940's and the anti-Disney subversiveness of low-budget cartoon auteurs like Leon Schlesinger. In his preface, Leland takes pains to dissociate himself from any claim to hipness, humbly averring that ''there is something inescapably nerdy about compiling a history of hip.'' Pshaw, Johnny baby! In your case, the hipster's pose serves you far better than the nerd's.